WinterPark Home

06The kitchen and living room

The kitchen was one of the rooms Libema renovated most recently. White quartz-look counters and a tile backsplash frame a stainless steel range, microwave and refrigerator, and the cabinets and drawers come stocked with cookware, dishes and a coffee maker, so the first thing you do in the house can be making an actual pot of coffee instead of driving out to find one. Wood-look vinyl plank flooring runs from the kitchen through the dining area and into the living room, which keeps the whole front half of the house simple to wipe down over a stay that runs weeks or months at a time.

The living room sits open to the kitchen: a sectional sofa faces a wall-mounted TV, with a ceiling fan overhead to take the edge off the Florida heat between air-conditioning cycles. Because the plan is open, someone cooking dinner can still hear the TV and talk with whoever is on the sectional, a small thing that matters more over a month than it would on a one-night stay. The white cabinets and the gray-and-white palette, with a few orange accents worked in, keep the space bright even with the blinds drawn against the afternoon sun.

The dining area sits at the pass-through between the two rooms, close enough to the stove that plates go straight from the pan to the table. It is a modest kitchen by square footage, and a complete one: enough counter space to cook a full dinner, enough storage that a family or a group of clinicians sharing the house are not living out of grocery bags for a month, and enough seating at the table for meals to happen there instead of on laps in front of the TV. The coffee maker and stocked cabinets mean a night-shift arrival does not have to hunt for a mug before finding a bed.

07The bedrooms and the bathroom

Three bedrooms hold four beds between them, which is how the house sleeps eight. One bedroom is set up with two beds rather than one, shown in its own photo below, which suits kids sharing a room, coworkers on the same assignment, or a grandparent who comes along for part of a family stay. Ceiling fans run through the bedrooms, and the wood-look flooring continues back from the living room, so the whole house reads as one continuous surface that is easy to keep clean through a stay that runs a month or longer.

The bathroom was renovated with a tiled walk-in shower behind a glass door and an LED-lit vanity, and it is the single bathroom for the whole house. That detail is worth planning around: at eight sleepers, one bathroom means mornings take some coordination. WinterPark Home suits a family, a couple, or a small group on compatible schedules, and a full house of eight all trying to leave for work at the same hour is a tighter squeeze around one shower. It is the main reason to compare this home against our larger houses before you book. Beds and linens are provided and made up before you arrive, the same as at every Libema home.

The front door locks with a keypad, so nobody is juggling a physical key between roommates or waiting on us to cut a copy for a second guest. The code arrives with your arrival instructions a few days before check-in, the same way it does at every Libema home.

08The porch, the driveway and the yard

Out back there is a screened porch with patio seating and a grill, the kind of space that turns a furnished house into somewhere you actually cook dinner outside without fighting Florida's evening bugs. It looks over the fenced yard, so kids or a dog have room to be outside without a parent standing at the door the whole time. On a warm Central Florida evening, that screen is doing more work than it looks like it should, keeping mosquitoes out while the porch stays open to the yard.

Out front, a private concrete driveway gives you off-street parking on a block where the houses sit close to their neighbors. This is a modest, older concrete-block home: the black roof trim shows some peeling paint, and the lawn is patchy with a few bare spots. Both show up plainly in the photo gallery, the same as they look in person. What you get in return is a fenced yard, a screened porch and a driveway on a quiet residential street, at a price well under what the same square footage would run inside Orlando's tourist corridor.

09Who this house suits best

At three bedrooms and one bathroom, WinterPark Home suits a household more than a large group. A single travel nurse or colleagues sharing an assignment near AdventHealth Altamonte get plenty of room and privacy, and a family displaced from their own home during a repair, or relocating to Orlando and using the month to learn a neighborhood, gets a real kitchen and yard instead of a hotel room. It shows up on our travel nurse and medical housing, relocation and long-stay, insurance and displacement, and corporate and business housing pages for exactly those reasons.

It also works for a family staying a week or two for a park trip, and for a snowbird who wants a whole winter on a quiet street instead of months of hotel points; our snowbird and seasonal stays and family vacation pages cover both. For a family keeping vigil at one of the AdventHealth campuses nearby, our patient and family housing page walks through how that works, month to month, on the same written agreement. Sleeping eight across four beds means the house flexes for most of those stays, but the single bathroom is the detail that should decide whether it, or one of our larger homes, is the better fit for your group.

It also suits a guest who cares more about location than about new construction. This is a modest, older concrete-block house, and the photos and the honesty notes on this page say so plainly: the roof trim shows wear and the lawn is patchy. What it trades for that is a real driveway, a real yard, a screened porch and a short run to two AdventHealth campuses, at a rate well under what a newer build in the same corridor would ask.

10What's around the house

WinterPark Home sits in Lockhart, a settled community north of Orlando along US-441, Orange Blossom Trail, between the city and Altamonte Springs. Its old Airbnb listing name was 'Winter Park-Side Home,' and the drive backs that up: Winter Park's Park Avenue is about 8 minutes away, and AdventHealth Winter Park on Lee Road is closer still, about 6 minutes. Rosemont, which shares WinterPark Home's own 32810 zip code, adds a second layer of quiet, green streets around Lake Orlando, with the same quick access to I-4: north toward Altamonte, south toward downtown.

Winter Park FL Downtown HD01 · Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · resized from 3264x2448

Close to home, a community park with a playground and courts is a short walk from the house, the kind of detail that matters more once you have settled into a stay of three or four weeks than it does over a single weekend. For groceries and a wider range of food, our Pine Hills and northwest Orlando area guide covers the Presidente Supermarket and the Caribbean and Latin kitchens along West Colonial Drive, plus Barnett Park, all a short drive from this side of the city. Pharmacies along Silver Star Road and Pine Hills Road, plus a Walmart on Princeton Street, cover everyday errands without a special trip.

11Getting to work, the hospitals and the parks

WinterPark Home earns its old name from the drive as much as anything. AdventHealth Winter Park is about 6 minutes away, and Rollins College, also in Winter Park, is about 11. Head the other direction and the ADP offices in Maitland are about 3 minutes away. AdventHealth Orlando is about 10 minutes, AdventHealth Altamonte about 12, and downtown Orlando about 13, all by road without traffic; I-4 and US-441 carry most of that traffic, and both slow down in the morning and evening peaks like any Orlando route. Orlando Health / ORMC and Arnold Palmer and Winnie Palmer, downtown at the same campus, run about 16 and 17 minutes.

The Orange County Public Schools headquarters is about 11 minutes away, and Full Sail University about 19. For time off, Wekiwa Springs State Park is about 20 minutes north, the Central Florida Fairgrounds about 15, and Camping World Stadium and the Kia Center about 15 and 12 minutes toward downtown. Lake Eola Park runs about 14 minutes and the Dr. Phillips Center about 14 as well. Universal Studios Florida is about 26 minutes and Magic Kingdom about 47, both longer drives than the hospitals and parks closer to home, which is the trade a quieter, more affordable street asks for. None of these routes use a toll road for the everyday commute; I-4's express lanes are tolled separately if you want to pay to skip the rush-hour backup, but the general lanes and US-441 are free.

12A month at WinterPark Home

A typical month at WinterPark Home starts the way most of ours do: you let yourself in with the keypad code we send a few days before arrival, and the beds, kitchen and Wi-Fi are already set up, so the first night does not require a run to the store for anything but groceries. Mornings mean coffee from the stocked kitchen and a short drive up US-441 or I-4 toward AdventHealth Altamonte or AdventHealth Winter Park. Evenings mean the screened porch, the grill, and the ceiling fan doing the work once the sun goes down and the yard cools off. There is a washer and dryer in the house, so scrubs or work clothes go straight into the wash instead of waiting for a laundromat trip on a day off.

On a weekend, Winter Park's Park Avenue is close enough for a slow afternoon of shops and restaurants, and Wekiwa Springs State Park is about 20 minutes north for a swim in spring water. Grocery runs go into Pine Hills for the Presidente Supermarket and the Caribbean and Latin kitchens along West Colonial Drive, both covered in our area guide. For a family riding out a home repair, or a relocation while you learn the city, that rhythm, work in one direction and a real neighborhood in the other, is what a furnished house does that a hotel room cannot.

13What guests said

These are real reviews from WinterPark Home's own Airbnb listing, quoted with the guest's name and the month they stayed.

Read enough of the reviews here and one thread repeats: guests single out how fast the host responds to a question before arrival or a laundry door that will not open. That kind of responsiveness matters more on a month-long stay than a one-night trip, when something is more likely to come up somewhere along the way.

14Booking WinterPark Home

Stays of a month or longer are booked directly with Libema on a written agreement that names the home, the dates, the rate and the deposit. Nightly and weekly stays run through WinterPark Home's own Airbnb and Vrbo listings. The rate and any pet deposit are confirmed in writing when you inquire; we do not publish prices, because the right number depends on your dates and how long you plan to stay.

If a company, an insurer or an agency is the one paying, we can put the agreement in that party's name, invoice monthly, and provide a W-9 and a certificate of insurance on request; net-30 terms are available to those established payers on a signed agreement, though the first booking is paid up front. A family or a leisure group pays through the normal booking process, deposit and all. Extensions run month by month, so if a repair, a treatment or a house search takes longer than planned, tell us as soon as you know and we will hold the following month where we can.

WinterPark Home is one of six Libema homes that publish a street address directly on the site; the other six list only a neighborhood and zip code, with the exact address shared once a booking is confirmed.

Two of our guides go deeper on stays like this one:

Seasonal · 5 min

Spending the Winter in Orlando

Why some snowbirds pick the middle of Florida over the coasts, what a winter here is like, and how a monthly house works for the season.

Read →

Medical Stays · 5 min

Staying Near the Hospital When Someone You Love Is Admitted

Practical notes for families facing weeks near an Orlando hospital: which homes are close to which campus, how to keep a household going, and where to ask for help.

Read →